Do you think I have been unfair? Then read this characteristic paragraph from an evening paper, headed “Earnest Young Women”:
“It must not be thought that the American girl merely dances her way through life. Not at all. She must have variety, therefore she dabbles lightly in art, literature, politics, or philanthropy. She has days for visiting hospitals or other institutions or she makes political speeches as Miss Barbara Sands, grand-daughter of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, has been doing recently, and as Sarah Murray Butler does all the time, or she even takes up business in her odd moments, like Elinor Dorrance, who at eighteen has decided to know all about the famous Campbell soups company of which her father is head and which she will inherit.”
This is not parody. It is the real thing, complete with snobbishness, clichés, naïveté, and the conviction that it doesn’t in the least matter how you write or what you write about so long as you are writing for other women. And it is published in a paper whose owners lay stress on the fact that it caters especially for intelligent and cultured womanhood.
“The famous Campbell soups company.” “Famous” is the sub-editor’s favourite word,[8] applied by him with unwearying zeal to all men and women who have ever got themselves in the public eye—unless they are really famous—applied even to furniture polishes, blends of whisky, and popular cigarettes. The sub-editor, that romantic soul, also assumes that the normal behaviour of the notorious or the merely well-known is flamboyant, so that when they manage their affairs without limelight they are “quietly married,” or they “leave quietly” for their honeymoon. The one thing the Press will in no circumstances permit them to do is to die quietly.
[8] “Amazing,” “mystery,” “thrilling,” and “dramatic” are also hot favourites in the Stock Phrase Stakes.
Is it not time that the pages of the Press were one quarter so up-to-date as the machinery which prints them? and that “journalese” should cease to be a synonym for the vapid, the crude, the provincial, and the semi-illiterate?
Impartiality being even rarer than commonsense, no one would be foolish enough to demand from a newspaper either complete lack of bias, or the presentation with equal prominence of both sides of a controversial case. Such impartiality would be contrary to human nature. But natural prejudice does not necessarily involve the deliberate distortion of news.
News can be, and is, habitually manipulated both by distortion and suppression. The first procedure is, on the whole, less objectionable, since a little knowledge on the part of a reader will often enable him to realise that a case is being overstated. Moreover, he may allow for the known political complexion of a journal. Suppression assumes two shapes, partial and complete. The latter, which is the more unusual, comes into play when a newspaper does not find it convenient or politic to give publicity to events or ideas, but this reticence does not necessarily spring from sinister or interested motives. Indeed, it may simply be because the news editor, who lives in a curious world of his own, often remote from the contacts of the outer world, and who is avid only of stereotyped sensations, fails to recognise news when it is thrust under his nose. In such instances, a rival may possibly recognise “news value.” Or again, he may not.
This partial suppression, of which the Socialist newspapers are quite as guilty as the so-called “Capitalist Press” denounced by them for the practice, is one of the deadliest weapons in the armoury of journalism. Let it be clearly understood that we are concerned here not so much with a matter of unfairness or injustice to an individual or a section of the community, as with injustice to the community as a whole, which is deliberately and systematically deprived of knowledge of all the facts necessary to form a judgment regarding the issues at stake in a question which may affect the national well-being.
For instance, it is impossible for the average newspaper reader to form a detached opinion of the rights and wrongs of a coal strike. The miners’ wages are alternatively exaggerated and minimised; exceptionally high earnings in the coal fields are paraded as typical of the average for the industry as a whole; or the earnings of coal hewers are represented at much below the real level on the strength of figures including the wages of boys and surface workers. All these facts are readily available and accessible in any modern newspaper office. But only a selection of them is published by any one paper.